Is there any way in which the turkic pechenegs, who lived in the pontic steppe from the 9th to 12th centuries, could have unified into a single kingdom or khanate?
AHC: Centralized Pecheneg kingdom
- Thread starter GauchoBadger
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It was not impossible.
I mean they were turkic and the turkics were known for their ability to form big united polities well before and after the Pechenegs.
And there's only one way to unify - one group/bloodline/dynasty gets control over the whole loose confederation.
Since the Khasars till the Golden Horde the South Russian steppes didn't see the nomads unified into a strong khanate. The khanates were born on the other side of the Great Eurasion steppe and the nomad losers flew westwards.
In my opinion it's just luck.
And better climatic conditions of the western Eurasian steppes.
The climatic conditions of the eastern Eurasian steppes were extremely harsh - regular "bad winters" killed most of the nomadic livestock.
So the eastern nomads couldn't survive without the sedentary societies (looting or taxing them) - every few years they faced a dilemma "sell your children into slavery and afterwards die of hunger - or form an Empire to get food from the sedentary civilisations".
The Western nomads could survive without an empire-building much much longer, it was not that necessary as in the Eastern steppes.
Pechenegd did formed a khaganate IOTL, which was allied with Constantinople for a while : should Rus fail to form a strong confederacy themselves, and if Pechenegs somehow inherit more of Khazar's dominance, maybe you could see their khaganate being strengthened, altough more on their western borders than eastern, as the Pontic Steppe was a doormat of western Eurasia at this point.
All the way from Moldavia and to the Volga, where they replaced the Magyars (a key ally of the Khazars, so weakening Khazaria's western borders and allowing the Rus to destroy them in time).
They were themselves pushed out by the Oghuz Torks and the Rus, and then the Cumans. The Romans allied with the Cumans to finish them off after a long period of employing the Pechenegs as soldiers. Pecheneg remnants lived on as an assimilated "Magyar" tribe and as a component of the Black Hats, who were various Oghuz-speaking steppe peoples in tight alliance/service of Rus through to the 13th c.